About Me

This journal -- the antecedent to the blog -- gets its start from a
decision to dig up all the grass in our yard and plant flowers,
perennials, ground cover, shrubs, a small tree or two, berry bushes,
vegetables. My first title for it, I remember now, was "The Amateur." I
am fond of the word's Latin roots -- it means "lover." I'm not trained,
I'm not a professional, I just began digging things up and planting. To
be an amateur means to do something not for money, but for love. Five
summers later, I am still an amateur, but the place has blossomed. I
loved the development stage; now I'm working on management, maintenance
-- skills that require patience. I like doing things, trying things, and
seeing what happens. I experiment, I learn from experience (or try to).
I love to see things growing. I love the idea that when we step
outdoors, we are in nature. The "environment" begins at the doorstep.
Open the door; breathe the air; listen. Today a cardinal sat on the head
of a sunflower, bobbing and calling, looking for all the world as if he
had just lost something. I noticed he ate a few sunflower seeds too.
There is always something to see.Here's the "interests" list:

Monday, December 1, 2014

Writing Poetry Again: A Garden of Verses

I'm writing
poetry again.

Three of my
poems from a group written in the last couple of years are being published in this month's
issue of an online poetry journal called "Verse-virtual."

Poems, or
ideas for poems, began visiting me a few years ago, a return I associated
with both the progression of life towards its later stages and the amount of time I began spending
outdoors close to the ground, often on it, getting to know the lives of plants.

At least
the plants, and the activity of trying to grow them, provided the material to
write about, draw from, or allude to. And the act of gardening, and the
garden itself, provided a small army of metaphors.

Here's the
link for the published poems:

http://www.verse-virtual.com/current-poetry.html

The first poem,
"The Tiny Beak the Flower Bends," comes from an encounter with a
hummingbird that for some reason did not notice me standing on the patio bricks
and so hovered very close by. I must have been standing still for some considerable
time, the reason for which I cannot recall. How else to explain why I looked to the tiny, active, and generally highly suspicious bird like a stunted tree? In any event it felt perfectly secure in examining the nearby
flora at its own pace. I have a feeling that the penny dropped at some
bird's-eye instant, and then my my rendezvous with the winged creature the size of an
overfed wasp bearing a characteristically aggrieved expression in its avian eye
was abruptly terminated.

However,
the close encounter left its impression.

The poem "At Wollaston Beach" attempts to sum up an hour when it seemed almost the
whole span of Greater Boston urban life was present on a July evening on the
strip of sidewalk that abuts Shoreline Drive on one side and the state's sandy
beachfront on the other. For a complex of reasons people spend more time
walking, biking, hanging out, staring at their phones and people-watching on the walkway at this 'beach' than they do on the
sand. The seawall invites sitting. The clam houses across the roadway provide a
good shoreline ambiance, particularly fried seafood smell, and a diversity of
ages and stages of life are generally represented.

Verse-Virtual's journal's editor, Firestone Feinberg, was very
kind in preserving some odd punctuation I whipped up to slow the pace of the
poem's concluding lines.

The third
poem, "'My Little Girl' Dreams," does follow from a series of dreams
that, to the best of my conscious recollection, featured the image of a little
girl. Some of the imagery of the poem, however, comes from my highly grown-up daughter Sonya's account
of a birthday party thrown for her, mixed up -- in an airy milestone anniversary
confection -- with memories of things we did together in her childhood.

Many
other poets have work appearing in this issue of Verse-Virtual. If you have the
time and the inclination, this online journal rewards attention.